AMD to Release 28nm chips in Q4 2011, Radeon HD7000 GPU Samples Ready

AMD’s CEO Thomas Seifert has revealed that the Company already has working samples of its upcoming 28nm chips. The 28nm GPU Chips Codenamed Southern Island will Launch in the end of Fourth Quarter of 2011 so its likely we would be seeing performance estimates and details on the new GPU architecture within a few months.

Also to note, AMD will introduce a totally new architecture in its next generation HD7000 series Graphic chips by itching the VLIW instruction format and looking forward to move towards the SIMD wide-vector execution. Following is an overview of the GPU architecture slide which we posted here:

A few highlights from the talk: Multiple primitive pipelines for setup, etc.
Real caching in L1, L2, separate color / z caches for graphics and atomics
Concurrent tasks
Out of order resource allocation
ECC on srams and drams

Some sources also reveal that both Globalfoundries and TSMC will be used in the production of the 28nm chips. The codenames of the GPU’s were also leaked in Catalyst 11.7 Release Driver which are listed below:

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As you can see, HD6990 would be replaced by a new Dual GPU based card featuring 28nm core based on the new architecture codenamed New Zealand. The Single Chip based High end GPU’s would consist of Tahiti XT based HD7970 and Tahiti Pro based HD7950 which are replacements for the Antilles based HD6970/6950 graphics cards. Thames XT (HD7870) and Thames Pro (HD7850) would replace Barts based HD 6850/6870. Thames LE (HD 7790) would be a replacement for the Barts LE based 6790 Mid-End card.